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LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS
Director of the French Institute, to be elected to the new post in the Science and Technical
Secretariat run by the Institut de Soudure.
6
Strategically, this was an excellent move since
France already held the Secretariat for ISO/TC 44. In addition, Leroy was the first Chair
of ISO/TC 44, as well as being Chair of Commission VII
Standardisation
(C-VII), which
was a guarantee of effective liaison between both organisations.
7
It is to be noted that,
following an earlier agreement with ISO, C-VII, in fact, was actually established to provide
the basis of collaboration between IIW and ISO in the first place, particularly since the
majority of members of ISO/TC 44 were members of C-VII. Leroy was in a unique position
which ensured that ISO received the technical information needed from IIW and that IIW
material was incorporated into ISO standards. Leroy was then to serve in that post for 24
years until he relinquished his position as Chair of C-VII and was replaced by Mr Henry
Granjon in 1974. Mr Marcel Evrard then replaced Leroy as Chair of ISO/TC 44, altering
the close relationship that had previously existed between ISO/TC 44 and C-VII. Prior to
Granjon’s replacement of Leroy, C-VII had been amalgamated with another commission,
Commission IV
Documentation
(C-IV), in 1967 to form Commission VII
Documentation
and Standardisation
(C-VII). IIW then formed a Select Committee
Standardisation
(SC-
STAND) in 1976, at the General Assembly in Sydney, Australia under the Chairmanship of
Granjon. This was to be renamed as the Board of Directors Working Group
Standardisation
(WG-STAND) in 2007.
ISO was born from the union of two separate organisations. One was
the International Federation of the National Standardization Association
(ISA) established in NewYork in 1926 and the other was the United Nations
Standards Coordinating Committee established in 1944 and administered
from London. With regard to ISO, the basic idea of post-war international
standardisation was to evolve international standards from those that had
already been developed nationally and then to re-implement them back at
a national level as ISO standards.
8
By the late 1960s, the emphasis would
change from utilising national standards to directly developing international
standards.
9
For a number of years, considerable concerns were expressed to ISO from industry
due to the length of time that it took to produce a standard. Prof. Anders Thor, the Swedish
Secretary of two ISO committees, said that ‘the story of attempts to speed-up the production
of international standards is one of moving bottle-necks’. The underlying issue, in all reality,
was that ‘demand was exceeding supply’.
10
In respect to Thor’s comments, a study was to
‘reveal a “shocking” fact that the average time for preparing an international standard was
calculated at seven years’.
11
Conscious of the significant expertise within IIW and the high number of documents
produced by the Institute that had been submitted for publication through ISO in recent
years, ISO established a new category of international standardising bodies in 1984